POST-SEPARATIST MONTREAL ENJOYS A LIBERAL EXPANSION

Albert Hache does not have to read stock tables or financial reports to know that business is booming in Montreal.

Hache, 67, can tell by the number of customers willing to pay him $30 for a one-hour tour of Mount Royal park in a barouche drawn by his horse, Mario.

''When the Parti Quebecois came into power, business fell,'' Hache said in a recent interview atop the verdant, extinct volcano that overlooks the St. Lawrence River in downtown Montreal. ''The PQ insulted the whole world. Business is better under the Liberals. I sometimes make five tours a day in summer.''

While Hache relies on his homespun economic gauge, sophisticated businessmen and bankers clad in three-piece suits refer to market studies and financial indexes.

They come to the same conclusion: Montreal is in the midst of an economic renaissance following the slump it experienced after the separatist Parti Quebecois came to power in November, 1976.

The surge of business activity has intensified since Robert Bourassa led his Liberal Party back to power on a pro-business and federalist platform in the December, 1985, provincial election.

One sure indicator has been the value of construction starts in the Montreal area in 1986: $2.5 billion worth, an increase of 49 percent over 1985.

Retail sales were up 8.8 percent in the first 11 months of 1986 from the year-earlier period. Personal disposable income per capita after taxes in the Montreal area was $13,564 last year, 6.7 percent higher than the Canadian average and 12.7 percent higher than the average in the rest of Quebec province.

Volume on the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1986 rose 70 percent to 1.1 billion shares traded with a value of $16 billion.

The Toronto Stock Exchange maintained its preeminence with 4.9 billion shares traded with a value of $63.7 billion, but the Montreal exchange surpassed its Toronto counterpart for the first time in the number of new company listings: 177 compared with 165 for Toronto.

Metropolitan Montreal, with a population of 2.9 million, accounted for 52 percent of the province`s gross domestic product.

Employment in Montreal is growing at a rate of 3 percent a year. In 1986, there were 1.3 million people working in the region. Unemployment is close to 11 percent, down from the 14 percent figure of 1983, when the economy began emerging from the recession that shook the Western world in the early 1980s.

''We had a difficult period in the 1970s,'' Marcel Daoust, chairman of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview. ''Thank god, we had some instruments that had been put in place a decade before so that the business community didn`t have to start from scratch.''

What Daoust referred to were the steps taken in the 1960s by the Liberal government of then-Premier Jean Lesage during the period of Quebec history known as ''The Quiet Revolution.''

Lesage ensured cheap electricity for industrial development by nationalizing Hydro-Quebec, which generates, develops and markets the province`s hydro-electric power. He established a pension fund known as the Caisse de Depot et Placement, which invested Quebecers` funds in major projects that benefited the province. He established low-cost university education, laying the foundation for the professional and business management class that has led Quebec to prosperity in the 1980s.

Business people credited the separatist Parti Quebecois with initiating several economic measures that helped the economy recover from the social and political turmoil caused by its separatist policies.

In 1981, the Parti Quebecois brought in the Quebec Stock Savings Plan, which allows shareholders of companies based in the province to deduct their entire investment costs from the provincial income tax.

In 1986, more than $2.2 billion was raised in new stock issues under the plan.

Howard Ellison, a lawyer and project financing specialist with Berk Financial Group Inc., said the business community welcomed the Parti Quebecois` long-awaited move to join other Canadian provinces in dropping succession (inheritance) duties in April, 1985. ''Dropping them showed people that the province was moving away from socialism and toward the private sector,'' Ellison said.

There are also indications that the historically truculent Quebec labor movement has become less militant and more in step with management, Ellison said.

The Quebec Federation of Labor, one of the major labor groups in the province, has created a $50 million venture capital fund for investment in small and medium-sized businesses.

There have been fewer labor disruptions in recent years. In 1985, the last year for which complete statistics are available, there were 265 work stoppages in Quebec province, which accounted for 1.1 million man-days lost. In 1976, there were 357 labor disruptions, which accounted for 6.5 million man-days lost.

The Quebec government signed a new contract with its 170,000 public service employees last Dec. 18. It marked the first time in seven years that the negotiations had not deteriorated into labor disruptions and a forced settlement imposed by the legislature.

The Liberals have continued the Parti Quebecois trend of encouraging small and medium-sized Quebec businesses to replace some of the large multinationals which reduced their presence in Quebec or refused to make additional investments while the separatists were in power.

An estimated 50,000 executive-level businessmen and professionals, most of them anglos, left the province between 1976 and 1985. For the first time in a decade, Quebec is expected to have a positive migration when the final figures are tabulated for 1986.

The Liberals have also continued a Parti Quebecois policy of openly recruiting wealthy foreigners to immigrate. The prospective immigrant must have accumulated net capital of $500,000 and must be willing to invest $250,000 of that amount for three years in companies with assets of less than $25 million and which pay more than 60 percent of their salaries to Quebec employees.

New companies incorporated in Quebec since last May 1 pay no corporate provincial income taxes on annual earnings up to $200,000 in their first three years.

Although municipal property taxes in the Montreal region have skyrocketed this year because of evaluation increases of up to 40 percent, the provincial corporate tax is among the lowest in Canada. The provincial personal income tax--still the highest in Canada--has dropped to a maximum rate of 57 percent from 62 percent three years ago.

''Quebec has always been a collectivist society,'' Ellison said. ''In the past, it looked to the Church and then to nationalism. Now young French-Canadians are looking toward economic nationalism as a means of replacing cultural nationalism.''

Among its assets, Montreal is a major banking and financial center dealing in stocks and insurance. It contains 50 percent of the Canadian aeronautical industry. It is big in transportation equipment and the manufacture of chemicals and textiles. Three of the 10 largest engineering-consulting firms in the world are located in the region. It is a major air, rail and shipping center.

Its port is open all year. From Europe, it is a shorter distance to ship to Montreal than to New York. Rail connections from Montreal to Detroit and Chicago are also shorter than from New York or Baltimore to those Midwest destinations.

It is also an education center, with four major universities, including McGill University, and a large pool of highly trained professional and technical people. As of 1981, just under 45 percent of the people living in the Montreal area were fluently bilingual in French and English, according to figures provided by Statistics Canada, a government agency.

About three-quarters of the population speaks French as its native language (the world`s second-largest French-speaking city after Paris), with English the tongue of most of the rest.